I have finally gotten the drives I need, but I am at a loss as to where I can find this elastic material to do the suspension trick.

I had a Seagate SATAII 500GB HD and the seek/access noises were far too loud... it is the loudest thing in my system. It's not vibrational, because even holding the drive in my hand, the noise is unacceptable. Unfortunately, Seagate disabled its AAM feature.

So I bought two WD5000KS 500GB drives and I want to suspend them... I have 3 empty 5 1/4 slots... so that should be enough.

I'm concerned about heat, but noise is a primary concern.

So - where can I get this material? I'm looking for an easily-accessible store - not some specialty store. I live in downtown Toronto, so my selection is fairly limited...

Hopefully nobody's tackled this yet, but I haven't come across it anywhere...

Are there any opinions on how Jedster's decoupling method for the P180 would rank on this list (described here)? It's apparently much quieter than the stock grommets alone (which makes perfect sense to me) but I wonder how much quieter... It doesn't seem like it would be quite as quiet as elastic suspension, but it's also obviously far less work. I'm curious if anyone else (besides the one person with the pictures) has tried it.

Quick question, elastic suspension is the best way to decouple the drives from the case, but if you don't have heatsinks or a HD cage connected to the drives they tend to overheat.

Why not just suspend the hard drive cage? You'll probably get some noise from it vibrating the air around it, but you'll lose the direct vibration effects and won't have to worry about heat dissipation. Anyone tried this before and compared it to individually suspended drives?

I have 2 drives in a detached suspended cage. I'd say its about the easiest way to suspend multiple drives.

eSATA allows cables up to 6'. You could have HD's at quite a distance in a sub-enclosure with foam,rear venting etc. If there's to be more than 2 drives so distanced and enclosed-the housing could get more sophisticated by adding a remote fan-very low rpm. A non-system USB-2 HD,of course can also be so removed/enclosed.

A heatsink won't make heat go away,a heatsink or heatpipes for that matter,re-locates the heat. In your car,the water moves the heat from the block to the radiator,but then the heat is removed mainly as the car's speed creates airflow-with the fan as a supplement.

In this instance-cutting a small inlet in the front floor might cool that region. It still takes thinking out what the airflow path tends to be. I tend to favor a strategy of exhaust fans only---then any hole is a passive intake and a drill or dremel can redesign the air paths. The sam works in reverse with intake fans. You can go intakes only.
Often there's plenty of exhaust fan and one major inlet-so the air goes from point A to point B and outside that path-it can stagnate. Smaller,proportional inlets let airflow patters be managed.

wow, i know it's an old post, but what i want to ask is still relevant - do you need to ground the suspension? i have the zalman heat pipes and it's grounded to the case - beside being separated with rubber.
thanks,
Dan.

Does anyone use a RAM-drive for the OS, and programs, then NAS located somewhere else where the drives can be kept cool without the noise?

In my network, I have a NAS with 500 Gigs of RAID 1 storage (decent for right now..), but the RAM drive is a little bit out of my current budget, (or far out of it, since it is 0 right now)...

I bought my first house (closing Tuesday) and after I move in and get the budget all established, I am going to have storage in 19" rackmounts out of 'ear-shot', and look to move to RAM drives for the PC's.... Gonna have to upgrade the network to Gigabit too.....

Hi,
I find this topic very useful!
i have a problem with my case, i want to suspend my HDD as you shown but my cas is a Gigabyte Poseidon and has plastic brackets to hold the HDD.
what can i do in this situation?
thanks...

wow, i know it's an old post, but what i want to ask is still relevant - do you need to ground the suspension? i have the zalman heat pipes and it's grounded to the case - beside being separated with rubber.thanks,Dan.

no. they are grounded through the cable, you can verify it yourself with an ohmeter

I know you're not supposed to move the PC when a drive is suspended, but is just a little movement okay? I'm about to build a new computer with a suspended drive, and the computer will go with its door side facing a wall. Because of that, I can't really get to the drive once the computer is in its place.

I will be setting everything up on a table a few feet away, so would it be okay to just carefully move the computer over with the drive inside? I understand you're not supposed to move it with a suspended HDD, but it's not as if I'm lugging it around outside or not keeping it upright.

Anyway, I am about at my wits' end with the Maxtor drives. When I built the system about two years ago they were solid performers, but back then my setup was much louder so their noise didn't bother me.

Now I can hear every seek and it kills me, especially since they are in RAID0.

I want to reduce the noise and have given a lot of thought to suspension. However, I move my PC a couple times a month (it's my LAN box too) so I'm kind of concerned about the stability issues.

Should I just buy a couple SmartDrives (expensive)? Would it be cheaper to get a couple Spinpoint Ts and set them up in RAID0 in my case (would their already-low noise combined w/ the rubber grommets of the P182 render them sufficiently silent)? Would performance be about the same as my current setup? What about the Zalman heatpipe unit?

I'm really drawn to suspension as it seems cheap and elegant. I'm pretty careful moving my gear around and wouldn't have any problems keeping the case upright (the thing certainly weighs enough) but obviously it wouldn't matter how elegant the solution if when I arrived at my destination my HDDs were damaged.

I probably ruined the sticky with all this nonsense, but I know I can't be the only one wary of suspension who shares my concerns.

Everybody makes decisions. First, you made the decision to run 4ea small (for today) HDDs in RAID. That, by itself, is a reasonable decision.

Now you want to tone down seek noise. Suspending four HDDs would do the job... if you have room to suspend 4 HDDs.

And you want to frequently transport your computer to LAN parties. This rules out many otherwise good suspension methods.
---------------------------

Unless you have a gigantic computer case - a Cosmos-alike - you're not going to be able to provide secure suspension for 4ea HDDs. (If you can do that in a normal computer case you should qualify for a nice prize somewhere! )

You can have 4ea HDDs in a normal case that you can carry around... but good luck with the seek noise. You can substitute one or two larger HDDs and achieve your quiet-seek goals with some diligent DIY on HDD suspension - but that costs money and you lose the RAID.

So I have two (possibly three; my second is used by a DVD-ROM which I can lose since I already have a DVD+-RW in the top bay) free 5.25" bays right now, which I can use for suspension or buying a couple SmartDrives or some other solution.

I imagine the suspension works better as the elastic gets tighter, so that might help my drives stay in place.

So what if I suspend my drives and transport my case very carefully (upright, of course)? Should I be OK?

Here is my solution for removing hard disk vibrations.
This is really good because you can move your PC anywhere without worry that your hard disk will fall out or be damaged. They are well placed and can be easily removed.

You will need one bicycle inner rubber (2 euro) and two wood pencil (in my case four because I have two HD).

Hope this helps someone.

Drazen

Last edited by zicko on Fri Dec 14, 2007 10:27 am, edited 1 time in total.

Here is my solution for removing hard disk vibrations.This is really good because you can move your PC anywhere without worry that your hard disk will fall out or be damaged. They are well placed and can be easily removed.

You will need one bicycle inner rubber (2 euro) and two wood pencil (in my case four because I have two HD).

Hope this helps someone.

Drazen

Huh, looks pretty interesting.

So you cut up the tube into rings, poke the screws through the tube rings to secure the tube rings to the drive, then pull the tube ring through the drive area and secure a pencil to each side.

Very nice.

My only concern is that eventually, the screw hole you made might tear the rubber. How long have you had your setup like this?

It looks really nice and it makes me wonder why I haven't seen something like this before.

In any event, my finals are (finally) over, so I'm gonna crack open my case and get to work this weekend.

reading this sticky including the links it made make me think the next advance would be suspending links that are heat conducting, e.g. metallic Stretch Magic ... IF an inexpensive solution can be found, that is

in my Panasonic Toughbook, the 2.5"hd is very tightly covered by a metal casing (for heat I think) and then some foam like things for stability

reading this sticky including the links it made make me think the next advance would be suspending links that are heat conducting, e.g. metallic Stretch Magic ... IF an inexpensive solution can be found, that is

in my Panasonic Toughbook, the 2.5"hd is very tightly covered by a metal casing (for heat I think) and then some foam like things for stability

cheers geoff

I'm going to explore using a quiet frisbee to blow at the suspended drive maybe with metal flanks to help dissipate heat ...

I got a Samsung HD321KJ (T series) in the mail today, and it sure vibrates a lot. A loud low frequency hum. I had also ordered a Nexus Disktwin heatsink/suspension kinda thing to go with it.
It's not a very good solution. The rubber blocks that serve to decouple the drive from the case, are much too rigid, and it took some force to get it into a 5.25 drive bay, which means the block is under pressure as well. I think it reduces vibrational hum by perhaps 40%, but it was outperformed slightly by a bed of tie wraps. Still not enough though.

I think I'll be returning it, although I could remove the rubber blocks to end up with a nice pair of heatsinks. Together with some elastic suspension it might be a good solution, although installing/removing a drive will be a menace, because you have to get the heatsinked drive past the elastics. Perhaps the bicycle-inner-tube suspension goes well with it, since the rubber rings are mounted to the harddisk rather than the cage. I'm just bit worried that bicycle tube is too rigid. I mean, it takes a lot of force to stretch it so I'm wondering if I don't end up with something that is similar to my tie wrap bed in terms of decoupling. Can you illuminate me on that, Zicko? Can you feel harddisk vibes on your case or drive cage?

I also got a Hitachi 5K160 (5400) notebook drive. I never knew notebook drives were that small! The Samsung (7200) is almost twice as fast in terms of buffered disk reads (60MB/s vs. 35MB/s). The Hitachi vibrates a lot as well, but I was thinking of just putting it on foam. It is so light that its cable connections have a big say in whether it hovers or sits, so to speak.

I got a Samsung HD321KJ (T series) in the mail today, and it sure vibrates a lot. A loud low frequency hum. I had also ordered a Nexus Disktwin heatsink/suspension kinda thing to go with it. It's not a very good solution. The rubber blocks that serve to decouple the drive from the case, are much too rigid, and it took some force to get it into a 5.25 drive bay, which means the block is under pressure as well. I think it reduces vibrational hum by perhaps 40%, but it was outperformed slightly by a bed of tie wraps. Still not enough though.

I think I'll be returning it, although I could remove the rubber blocks to end up with a nice pair of heatsinks. Together with some elastic suspension it might be a good solution, although installing/removing a drive will be a menace, because you have to get the heatsinked drive past the elastics. Perhaps the bicycle-inner-tube suspension goes well with it, since the rubber rings are mounted to the harddisk rather than the cage. I'm just bit worried that bicycle tube is too rigid. I mean, it takes a lot of force to stretch it so I'm wondering if I don't end up with something that is similar to my tie wrap bed in terms of decoupling. Can you illuminate me on that, Zicko? Can you feel harddisk vibes on your case or drive cage?

I also got a Hitachi 5K160 (5400) notebook drive. I never knew notebook drives were that small! The Samsung (7200) is almost twice as fast in terms of buffered disk reads (60MB/s vs. 35MB/s). The Hitachi vibrates a lot as well, but I was thinking of just putting it on foam. It is so light that its cable connections have a big say in whether it hovers or sits, so to speak.

Ciao, xen.

Hi Xen,

You should certainly give a try using bicycle-inner-tube.

I don't have any vibration on my case after I install my solution. Bicycle tube isn't so much stretch as you think on my case. Should be same for all other because dimension of hard disk and DVD-ROM space is same.

Spending 2 Euro and 1 hour for installation isn't so much for benefit you might have.

Actually I still have a used inner tube lying around so it wont even cost me $2 but atm the harddisk has gone back to where it came from so I can't try it out atm. I was using some Eminent SATA controller but it was doing weird things to my system.

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